The Catholic Vision

Title: 'The Catholic Vision

Author Edward D. O'connor, C.S.C

Content

Part 2: The sources of religious knowledge

The sources from which religious knowledge can be sought... nature and revelation

Nature has often been preceived as a manifstation of God, and most of the classical arguments for the existence of God start from nature. We call this natural knowledge of God by reason.

Tradition of Judeo-Christian is characterized by the claim of having received revalation from God himseld. This might be referred to as a superatural revalation as opposed to a natural revalation. We call this Divine revalation.

The church maintains that the human reason is inded capable by itself of attaining the knowledge God: but that the revelation given to through Jesus Christ and the phrophets is nevertheless very useful. The First Vatican Council (1870) declared:

God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude from created things by the natural light of human reason... But God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, has seen fit to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race in another way - one that is supernatural...

it does not say that the existance of God can be demonstrated.

Revelation enables us to know them easily, whereas without it the knowledge of God is quite difficult.

Divine revelation is absolutly indispensable in that God has by free "decree," call nam to "participate in the divine goods, which utterly transcend human understanding." That is to say, mankind has a vocation that is supernatural, beyond the reach of mere natural human powers.

Without revelation, we would not know that this has been offered to us; hence weather could we orient our efforts toward such a goal.

Plato conceived of "the good", Aristotle argued for the existence of an "unmoved mover" which he said must be conceived as "thought thinking itself"

St. Thomas Aquinas formulated the most stringent arguments of the existence of God. His Suma Theologia gives five ways, each starts from a different observation of the natural world.

4. Nature Speaks of God

In their vital, experimental interactions with the world around them, and in their simple, untrained musings, people have instinctivly sensed that there must be some kind of Supreme Being.

All of the considerations fall into the perspective of St. Thomas's fifth way, often called the argument from design. In this perspective, the question of God (or divinity) reduces to the question, whether the actual world is simply the result of the chance interaction of all of the factors involved in it, or whether some kind of intelligence is at work in it.

If there are things that cannot be the result of mere chance but must have come about by design, dome sort of intelligence must have produced them.

Chance presupposes multiple lines of causality, each operating according to its own inner necessity. It is when two or more such lines intersect, without this intersection being intentionally planned, that we speak of a chance event.

Can our world have come about simply by the chance interplay of the elements that make it up; or must there not lie an intelligent design behind it?

There is not therefore some evident master plan of the universe that argues for the existence of God. Instead, what we are asking here is whether, in a world that is largely the domain of contingency, there are not marks of intelligent design indicating amid all of this randomness, the work of a purposeful agent.

Implicit Attitudes

• The Meaning of Life - Underlying all of these attitudes is the conviction that wife does have, can have, or ought to have, a meaning. The existentialism of Sartre.
• Confronting the world with confidence - Most people, however, go on living, and do so with a hope, security, and expectation which implicitly acknowledge that the world is not just chaos. They live in the belief that something can be accomplished, that life can indeed be worth the effort. In people who consciously believe in God and his promise of a future reward, this behavior is understandable.

Some common ways to God

• Beauty Three aspects of the world

God and the world of Science

Did not finish this chapter because it is a little off topic of research here. Need to back an finish from page 93